Low Budget iGEM

Lab Constest

Overview

It is well known that doing science is expensive and lot of economical resources are needed, specially in Synthetic Biology.Processes like PCR, DNA extraction, miniPrep, among others, need specialized equipment and chemical compounds that have considerably high prices and only a few people can afford them. Costs in materials affect the development in Latin American researches in the Synthetic Biology field and the formation of new iGEM teams in Latin America.

Considering this we decided to organize a non-time consuming competition called Low Budget iGEM that aimed to demonstrate that most of the protocols may have a new and cheaper way go being conducted. We also wanted to know the teams before the competition.

What was the competition about?

The teams that accepted this challenge had to design a new and cheaper way to make a normal protocol in the lab. At the beginning, we proposed that the participants could choose between PCR, DNA extraction and transformation but we decided that they could do any other protocol the want to. We received excellent and very interesting results, we invite you to check out the process.

Contest notice

As soon as the idea came out we try to contact as much teams as possible trough Twitter and we had the opportunity to have Skype meeting with some of them:

Skype Meeting with Tec Monterrey Team

We talked with almost 25 Teams all around the world, some times we had to wake early in order to communicate us with them. We send a pdf file with the instructions of the contest to everyone that seemed interested, you can check it:

File:Col LowB.pdf

We also made this video, to remind the teams about the contest and to gather more participants:

Our participants

Tec-Monterrey.

Here you can find a file with the complete description: File:TecMonterreyCOlo.pdf

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